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In Which I Check In To The Hotel California
April 13, 2008 by Mike
Malva-Rosa
I liked Valencia yesterday -- not just the beautiful women, but the buildings big and small, the sense of space, and it helps to see a big city like this on a warm, clear day: the light glistened -- and looked forward to returning today. But when push came to shove, I didn't feel like staying. The idea of all that Monday morning bustle tomorrow.. no thank you. I looked around the place again today and left having barely dipped my toe in.
So while I spent hours wandering inside, outside and around The City Of Arts And Sciences, enjoying the Museum of the Sciences and watching my first ever iMax film, Grand Canyon, (nice pictures but what a pile of guff), in the Hemisphere, I didn't return to the heart of older Valencia, the wide squares, red-brick religious buildings and elegant 19th-century townhouses.
I rode past the home of the America's Cup, a small corner of a Spanish field that will be forever Swiss, but couldn't figure out how to get in. Besides, a lot of it has been torn up for repairs at the moment. (I'm lucky enough to have enjoyed an America's Cup village in Auckland: maybe I'm happy with my memories from New Zealand?)
No paella valenciana, no coffee, no vino tinto.
Instead, my Sunday evening involved riding slowly up the Spanish coast, as the golden sun set over the mountains to my left, weaving from one small village to the next, the air warm and rich with the scent of orange groves, looking for a campsite. In Malva-Rosa, I found a corker. A friendly welcome: "Watch out, it's like the Hotel California here. We've got people who came for the night three years ago.. and never left!" Grass underfoot, rather than granite, on which to pitch the tent. The little bar is run by a Parisian called Vincent: a good man, good conversation, but he serves very large glasses of house red. It's a starry, starry night.
I wander, not quite in a straight line, to the beach. It's a bit rocky, but the view back from the edge of the sea is worth it's weight in gold.. if views weigh anything.. I can see distant lights to the south, a headland cuts off the view to the north, and there, in front of me, is.. nothing much. The campsite is hidden behind some trees. I can see, what?, ten houses from where I'm standing. None more than two stories tall. Do you understand what this means? There are no hotels. No high-rise apartment blocks, with only one-in-ten or one-in-twenty apartments in use, and the rest shuttered and dark. No urbanisacions. No strip-malls. No restaurants, ice-cream parlours or shops selling postcards, towels and ICE COLD BEER. No beer bellies. No football shirts. No people.
It doesn't seem like Spain.
And.. I woke up on the beach at about half-past two in the morning, brshed the sand out of my hair and stumbled back to the tent. Oops.
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